THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST
D: Daniel Alfredson (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre,
Annika Hallin, Mikael Spreitz, Jacob Ericksson
Part three of Lisbeth Salander's story starts out with Salander, broken and bloody, in an ambulance after being buried alive, shot three times and beaten to a pulp at the end of part two. And she's about to be charged with attempted murder, after trying and failing to kill her father. While she's recovering, investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist rallies the staff at Millennium magazine for an issue that will exonerate Salander and expose the creeps who have spent the last 15 years abusing her, trying to shut her up or do her in. It all gets pretty outlandish, a conspiracy involving a top-secret society of corrupt old men high up in the power structure of Sweden. (In these movies, men are not to be trusted, and men over 80 are not to be trusted at all.) What grounds it again are the performances. Nyqvist inhabits Blomkvist's bleary-eyed persona so completely, you can almost smell the coffee on his breath. As Salander, Noomi Rapace spends most of the movie confined to a courtroom, a jail cell, or a hospital bed, and for much of that time, she barely moves. Playing a character who's willed herself never to betray an emotion, she keeps you watching and wondering. The last encounter between the two is inconclusive. Or maybe not. He comes to the door of her apartment. They exchange a few words. Say they'll see each other around. But there's a real sense that their time together is over. More than the words, there's the way they look at each other. He's an open book. His face reveals everything. She's walled off, a cipher behind a dark-eyed mask. She's free, and she's a survivor, but she's been hurt too much for too long, and her wounds are too deep, for anybody or anything ever to repair the damage.
